If you can’t find your remote control for the television set, and you’ve pulled off the sofa cushions and looked under the television and in every other conceivable spot in your house, the gadget may have found its way to Carol Stream.
“We get a lot of them,” said Julie Aplington, education coordinator for the Du Page County Intermediate Processing Facility (IPF) in Carol Stream, where materials are sorted and prepared for the recycling market.. “People pick up piles of newspaper and throw them in the recycling bins, not realizing that their remote controls are in those piles.”
Remote controls aren’t on the list of acceptable materials for recycling, so they are sent to a landfill, as are the other unacceptable materials the center regularly finds, such as bowling balls, old photographs, even the VCRs and television sets that go with those remote controls.
During the next week, for instance, the IPF will receive a lot of Christmas wrapping paper and ribbon; these are not acceptable items for recycling because there’s too much tape on the paper (the glue cannot be recycled) and so much dye is needed to remove the color from the dark paper that it’s not an environmentally sound practice.
“One time we had a dead raccoon,” recalled Jerry Adams, manager of the IPF. “There have also been rounds of live ammunition.”
While most of the rejects are sent to landfills, a few are kept at the facility, such as a Dec. 16, 1936, copy of Moscow News.
The materials that are no-no’s, however, account for only 4.6 percent of the items handled by the IPF on a daily basis. “I am proud of that figure,” Adams said; the county’s education efforts have paid off.
Aplington said hauling companies know pretty clearly what materials are acceptable at the center. They include newspaper, magazines and catalogs, telephone books, corrugated boxes and brown paper bags, chipboard and boxboard. Also acceptable are glass bottles and jars, but not drinking glasses or windshields. Aluminum cans and foil, steel and bi-metal cans, soft-drink, milk and plastic detergent bottles, plastic six- and 12-pack rings and empty aerosol cans are also accepted.
The IPF, which is where recyclable materials can be taken to be prepared for market distribution, has been operating since Sept. 3, 1991. Of the 34 municipalities in Du Page County, 27 use the IPF for their residential curbside recycling programs. The IPF receives materials from the unincorporated areas of all nine townships. Some communities outside the county also use the center, but more than 90 percent of materials come from within the county’s borders, according to Eric Keeley, recycling coordinator for Du Page County.
Keeley said no municipality is forced to use the IPF. “As part of the agreement for the county providing the blue recycling bins, we did ask municipalities to use the center for 13 months,” he said, “but all those agreements have expired.”
Although county-owned, it is operated by CRInc., a division of Wellman Environmental Co. in Chelmsford, Mass.
The county built the IPF in response to the problem of shrinking landfill space. The center is located on 12 acres of industrial land on Fullerton Avenue just west of Schmale Road and across from the United States Postal Service Regional Sorting Center.
It was built at a cost of $10.4 million, which was raised through revenues collected from dumping fee surcharges at the county’s two landfills, Mallard Lake and Green Valley.
“No property tax dollars were used on this project,” Keeley said. “The county paid cash.”
The 55,000-square-foot building was designed to process 155 tons of materials each day during an eight-hour shift. Currently it is handling 250 to 270 tons a day.
The 22 sorters at the IPF know that this week they will see a lot of cardboard from Christmas gifts. It is likely that the tipping floor, a holding area where the material is first dumped by the 90 to 100 recycling trucks that come to the facility daily, will be close to the maximum load of 600 tons of cardboard and paper.
“Recycling is cyclical,” Adams said. “From Thanksgiving through Christmas, we have a very high volume of newspaper,” because newspapers are so fat with holiday ads. “During this time, we will also have a lot of aluminum cans, because of the parties.”
Since the IPF began operating a little more than two years ago, more than 220 million pounds of material have been diverted from landfills and sent to markets to become new materials.
The IPF opens each day at 6 a.m.; shortly after that, trucks begin arriving.
The first stop for every truck is the scale. After the load is weighed, the truck enters the facility and driver unloads materials. Each load is inspected to be certain it is not contaminated-that it does not contain landscape waste, motor oil or other unacceptable items.
When the trucks arrive, the materials are only partially sorted. Paper and cardboard are in one section of the truck; glass, aluminum, steel and bi-metal cans are together in another.
The paper and cardboard are handled at one end of the tipping floor; at the other side, the remaining materials are dumped into a pit, which serves as a hopper, to begin their journey through the state-of-the-art facility.
Paper and cardboard, which account for about 70 percent of all the materials, will follow one route; the other items follow a second.
Human sorters on the paper line remove corrugated cardboard, chipboard, magazines and telephone books, directing them down appropriate chutes. Newspaper continues, passing through one final quality control checkpoint. The sorting of these materials takes considerable upper arm strength.
As the other materials begin their movement through the facility on a conveyor belt, two human sorters check the items carefully, weeding out anything obviously unacceptable. For instance, a brass replica of the Statue of Liberty is pulled, as are the vacuum cleaner brushes that have found their way into the mix.
Also pulled at this point are the six-pack plastic rings and aluminum foil and pie plates. These are recycled, but at this point they are loaded into barrels.
As the materials continue their journey, large magnets will collect the steel cans. Aluminum cans are then separated from the mix.
Up ahead, No. 1 plastics, such as two-liter beverage bottles, are removed by workers, while the No. 2 plastics, such as milk bottles, are allowed to roll through for baling.
Meanwhile, workers are sorting glass by color. The first sorter removes green, the second brown, and, finally, clear falls out. The three colors of glass feed into special glass tanks to be crushed. A fourth tank collects the small, broken bits of mixed colored glass; this is the least desirable glass in the marketplace, but it can be used in asphalt paving. Each glass tank can hold 25 tons of material.
All the remaining materials are baled. Newspaper weighs 1,500 pounds per bale, while No. 1 plastic weighs 520 pounds.
“We have to perforate the plastics,” Aplington said, “because if we don’t, after we crush it, the bottles will eventually expand again and cause problems.
Aluminum is more easily crushed into bales and weighs 680 pounds per bale. Along one wall of the center are aluminum foil and pie plates. At this viewing, the pile is about 8 feet high and 20 in diameter. Because this aluminum can be compacted so tightly, there is still not enough for another bale. “All of the aluminum foil and pie plates that have been collected at the center from day one are still there,” Keeley said. “I think there are about 30 bales,” not enough for anyone to send a truck out to get.
Since the IPF opened, Adams said that not one load has been rejected for contamination by any buyer, nor has there been any major equipment breakdown that forced haulers to take their materials elsewhere.
“We have had haulers call and ask if they could use our facility when other facilities have had to shut down,” Keeley said, “and we have been cooperative. It doesn’t make sense to have that material go to a landfill.”
Adams said most materials remain in the local area. “The closer we can ship them, the better,” he said. Chicago’s All Waste Co. buys glass; FSC Paper Co. in Alsip buys paper.
Steel cans will be recycled to make refrigerators and file cabinets; glass will be used in insulation and as a substitute for sand in sandblasting. Plastics will be used for furniture and ski jacket insulation.
Several steps are taken to ensure the safety of the workers. All must wear hard-soled shoes to protect their feet from the glass, which could penetrate a soft sole. All wear earplugs. Keeley said that noise in the facility is a problem, and the county is looking for ways to reduce it.
Each worker is issued Kevlar gloves and sleeves, which are puncture and water resistant.
Hypodermic needles are a problem at times. “The workers can stop the line at any time; they have emergency switches,” Adams said, “and the needles are removed carefully.”
Hiring workers, Adams said, has not been a problem. “I have never had to advertise. People hear.” Starting pay for sorters is $6 an hour.
But as efficiently and straightforward as the center runs, Adams stresses that the IPF is not the total solution to Du Page County’s recycling needs or solid waste problems. “There are some materials that we will probably never take that don’t make sense,” he said.
One of those materials is the plastic grocery bag. While they are recyclable, a closed-loop system for recycling them already exists. “People can take them right back to the grocery stores where they got them,” he said. “That eliminates the sorting we would have to go through here.”
He also said that people have to reduce the amount of paper they use by writing on both sides, for instance. Also, the peanut-sized polystyrene foam used for packing, he said, very often doesn’t need to be recycled. “People can take them to a mailing center where they will be re-used or save them for their own use in mailing. They don’t have to be recycled.”
According to Carol Stream Village Manager Gregory Bielawski, the IPF has not presented any major problems for the community. “Occasionally on a windy day the plastics blow off the trucks,” he said, “but when that happens we talk to the IPF, and they have been very cooperative in working with the haulers to eliminate the problem.”
The village is gaining financially from the IPF. Village officials, concerned about the loss of tax dollars that could have been realized had the land been developed as industry, struck a deal with the county in which the village receives $20,000 a year plus a share of the profits the county realizes from the sale of the materials (the most it can get is the cost of its own recycling program, about $24 a household).
During the first year of operation, the county reported no profit. Figures for this year are still unavailable, though the county expects to see a modest net profit of $380,000. Last year the village reduced residents’ refuse collection bills.
Bielawski also said that a positive element for the community is the new education center in the IPF, set to open Jan. 10. This center will draw in school groups, scouting groups and civic organizations and, officials hope, enhance the image of Carol Stream.
The education center will be the only one of its type in the Midwest. “People will be able to come into the center and see the operation of the IPF from one of five large windows,” said Kay McKeen, director of School and Community Assistance for Recycling and Composting Education, or SCARCE, a group recently awarded a contract by Du Page County to operate the education center.
“They will be able to see firsthand what happens to the materials that come in here,” she said.
The center will also have a library that will contain books and audio-visual materials about recycling.
“I think it is good that from one of the windows people will be able to look out and see Mallard Lake in the distance,” she said. “They will be able to correlate the positive impact recycling is making with what they see in the distance.”
For more information about the education center, phone 708-752-4450 after Jan. 10.
